Law, Crime, and Law Enforcement: Year In Review 2004

International Law

The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) of Iraq, led by American L. Paul Bremer III, handed over power to an interim Iraqi government on June 30, 2004. Sovereignty of the new government was not absolute, however. The U.S. retained control over a number of governmental functions, most notably national security and the prison system. It also retained control over the custody of former Iraqi Pres. Saddam Hussein. No U.S. troops were withdrawn from Iraq in conjunction with the transition, and many U.S. administrators from the CPA moved into advisory positions in the new government.

The U.S. treatment of prisoners in Iraq, particularly in Abu Ghraib prison, received considerable attention. Many prisoners were subjected to various forms of physically and psychologically abusive treatment. They were kept naked for days at a time, photographed in that state, and forced to pose in sexually explicit positions. They were also deprived of sleep and threatened with electric shock or with attacks by military dogs. This treatment violated international humanitarian law, specifically the Geneva Conventions, which prohibited the humiliating or degrading treatment of prisoners of war. (SeeMilitary Affairs:Special Report.) According to investigators from the International Committee of the Red Cross, some of the abuses could be classified as torture and therefore violate not only the Geneva Conventions but also the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention Against Torture, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Soldiers accused of having perpetrated the abuses were arraigned in U.S. military courts, and by the end of 2004 several of the soldiers had been given jail sentences.

The Iraqi Special Tribunal, a court established specifically for prosecuting Saddam Hussein and his former officials, also received much attention. Unlike many other war-crimes courts, the tribunal was not an independent international judiciary; it was located in Iraq, it comprised Iraqi judges, and it relied on Iraqi law. In addition, the United States had a substantial role in the formation and operation of the tribunal; it was established by the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council and financed by the U.S. government, with U.S. personnel engaged in sifting through the evidence to be presented in the case and largely responsible for prosecuting Saddam and other defendants. Saddam was arraigned by the tribunal, and in July he appeared before it for the first time. He faced charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Saddam and his lawyers challenged the legitimacy of the court and the ability of Saddam to receive a fair trial in Iraq. Human rights groups also challenged the court’s legitimacy, arguing that an international court would be more appropriate to issue judgment in the case.

The two main cases brought before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) were Romania v. Ukraine, which concerned the establishment of a maritime boundary between the two states, and Benin v. Niger, a border dispute. Upon a request from the UN General Assembly, the court agreed to make an advisory ruling on the security barrier that Israel was building in occupied Palestinian territory to seal off the West Bank. In July the ICJ issued a 14–1 opinion (a U.S. judge dissented) that asserted that it had jurisdiction to issue an opinion and that the barrier violated international humanitarian and human rights law. Subsequently, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution that accepted the advisory opinion of the court, demanded that Israel comply with the legal obligations outlined in the opinion, and requested that the UN assess damages associated with the construction of the barrier.

When the International Criminal Court (ICC) entered into force in 2002, the U.S. successfully lobbied the UN Security Council to pass a resolution that exempted from prosecution U.S. participants in UN-authorized missions. The U.S. successfully renewed the exemption once, but in 2004 it became clear that the exemption would not be renewed a second time. The U.S. continued to work to shield itself from the reach of the ICC by pressuring other countries to sign bilateral immunity agreements under which each country promised not to turn over to the ICC any U.S. nationals or employees who worked for the U.S. government or military. As of November, more than 90 countries had signed such agreements.

In 2004 attacks by the Arab militia known as the Janjawid resulted in mass killings, rapes, looting, and starvation in the Darfur region of The Sudan, but the international community was slow to act. The question of whether the violence legally constituted genocide brought international law to the forefront of the crisis, because as a signatory of international genocide treaties the government of The Sudan was obligated to act to prevent genocide within its borders. In September the UN Security Council passed a resolution that threatened the Sudanese government with penalties if it did not disarm the Janjawid, but a later resolution passed in November warned only that “appropriate actions” would be taken if the government did not make progress toward peace. In October the African Union began to establish a peacekeeping force in the region.

Headlining the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 2004 was the trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic, who served as his own defense counsel, planned to rest his defense on the contention that the court was illegitimate and had no jurisdiction over him. The progress of the defense portion of the trial was delayed repeatedly because of his poor health, which doctors said was aggravated by the stress of defending himself. Worried about the delays, the court appointed defense counsel for Milosevic in September. The new lawyers appealed the decision, on Milosevic’s behalf, and as of November the appeal was pending. The lawyers later asked the court to remove them from the case, stating that they were unable to defend Milosevic because of his refusal to cooperate with them. In mid-2004 the appeals chamber of the ICTY overturned the convictions of Radislav Krstic and Tihomir Blaskic on some charges and reduced their sentences. Both men had been high-ranking military officials and had been convicted of genocide-related activities. Several key figures in the Yugoslav wars, including Bosnian Serbs Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, remained at large.

The Special Court for Sierra Leone was a tribunal backed by the UN that operated in that West African state with the cooperation of the government. Its mandate was to try rebel military commanders who had been charged with killings, rapes, enslavement of children as soldiers, and mutilation committed during Sierra Leone’s 10-year civil war. The leader of the rebel group, Foday Sankoh, had died of natural causes in UN custody in 2003, but the remaining rebel leaders in custody were brought to trial in June. Former Liberian president Charles Taylor, who had been indicted by the court in 2003 for having supported and funded the rebels, appealed the indictment on grounds that a court in one country had no jurisdiction over the leader of another. In May the appeals panel of the court rejected his argument, stating that the special court did have jurisdiction because it was an international tribunal. Taylor was in exile in Nigeria, which refused to turn him over for prosecution. In a related case, Liberian human rights groups called for the creation of an international tribunal for atrocities committed in Liberia’s 14-year civil war. If such a court was established, Taylor would likely face indictment there as well.

In October the Cambodian legislature voted to establish a UN-assisted tribunal, similar to the one in Sierra Leone, to punish the top leaders of the Khmer Rouge, the group that had led Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 and was responsible for the death of more than 1.5 million Cambodians. In April several groups in Côte d’Ivoire requested UN assistance in establishing a tribunal to investigate ongoing human rights violations allegedly committed by government security forces since 2000. A UN-assisted court was operating in East Timor (Timor-Leste), but concern with potential damage to relationships with Indonesia led officials in East Timor to reject calls for an independent international tribunal to try Indonesian troops responsible for violence during East Timor’s 1999 movement for independence.

In The Netherlands, Sebastien Nzapali, an army officer under Mobutu Sese Seko, former president of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), was sentenced to 30 months in prison for having tortured people in his country in 1995 and 1996. Nzapali had been living in The Netherlands since 1998 seeking political asylum, but he had not been granted refugee status. He was arrested in 2003 after three Congolese nationals filed charges against him. His conviction came under a Dutch law, the 1988 Implementation Act to the UN Convention Against Torture.

In Switzerland, Roma (Gypsies) brought a case against IBM, alleging that the company had provided the Nazis with technology that enabled them to track and kill Roma in the 1930s and ’40s. The Swiss courts determined that the case could proceed. In 2001 a similar case brought in U.S. courts under the Alien Tort Claims Act was dropped before being heard.

Court Decisions

The 2003–04 term of the United States Supreme Court was distinguished by its relatively small docket and by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist’s reduced leadership role. During his 18-year tenure as chief justice, Rehnquist had overseen the development of a solidly conservative institution—seven of the nine members of the court were appointed by Republican presidents—and the membership of the court had not changed for a decade. With an ideological majority at his side, Rehnquist had been able to assert the authority of the judiciary while he exercised a doctrine of judicial restraint, advanced an agenda of states’ rights in federalism-oriented cases, and attempted to restore the degree of legitimacy that the institution had lost in the 2000 case of Bush v. Gore. Rehnquist’s efforts to extricate the court from the mire of political jurisprudence were undermined during the term, however, by a number of developments within and around the court. While the size of the docket had dropped by nearly one-half since 1994, when the last appointment to the bench was made, recent events provided the court with cases that separated centrist opinions from those farther to the right. Instead of leading the court in its most controversial cases, the chief justice found himself aligned with a majority in only 8 of the 18 cases decided by 5–4 margins. Of the 73 cases decided with full opinions, Rehnquist wrote for the majority only twice. Recent events had also compelled the court to abandon its “hands-off” doctrine in matters that involved political questions. Indeed, in one eight-month period, the court answered questions brought by or against the U.S. president, vice president, secretary of state, and attorney general.

The cases that involved seemingly political questions fell into two basic categories—cases that concerned conventional matters in districting systems and political speech and cases that involved what had become known simply as the “war on terrorism.” In the first category the court upheld congressional-redistricting plans in Pennsylvania that had exhibited a Republican bias in elections. The plan, drawn by the Republican majority in the state legislature, had the effect of displacing Democratic incumbents. Although the court had previously rejected districting plans on the basis of racial gerrymandering, the plurality for the case of Vieth v. Jubelirer insisted that cases concerning partisan gerrymandering should not be entitled to legal standing in federal courts because the courts lacked a uniform standard for judging and resolving them. Regarding political speech, the court decided in McConnell v. Federal Election Commission that the McCain-Feingold ban on soft money (virtually unlimited and unregulated contributions to political parties) and various restrictions on election-period advertising were constitutionally permissible. The cases of Rasul v. Bush and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld addressed issues that involved U.S. governmental conduct in the war on terrorism. The first case involved a matter of jurisdiction. By a vote of 6–3, the court ruled that detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were entitled to file writs of habeas corpus and to request a review of their cases in U.S. federal courts, because Guantánamo Bay was considered legal territory of the United States. The implication of the ruling was that hundreds of foreign national detainees had a legal right to challenge their imprisonment. The second case, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, challenged the U.S. president’s presumed broad power to declare and detain American citizens as “enemy combatants.” Although the court ruled 6–3 in favour of Hamdi’s claim that he was unlawfully detained as an enemy combatant, the justices differed significantly on the precise reasons why that should be the case. For Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Stephen Breyer, Anthony Kennedy, and Sandra Day O’Connor, it was an entitlement to rebut the government before an impartial tribunal; for Justices David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, it was the absence of congressional authorization.

In the related field of criminal law, the court decided six noteworthy cases. Three cases dealt with police conduct in general and with self-incrimination in particular. In Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada, the court rejected Fourth and Fifth Amendment claims and ruled 5–4 that criminal suspects must identify themselves to police. In Missouri v. Seibert the court rejected a practice of interrogating suspects twice—once before and once after they had been informed of their Miranda rights—as a method of obtaining a confession. In the related case of United States v. Patane, the court was considerably less supportive of Miranda rights, and it ruled that physical evidence that police obtained on the basis of information provided by a criminal suspect who had not been read his rights was legally admissible in a court of law. In the case of Crawford v. Washington, Scalia wrote for the court that the confrontation clause of the Sixth Amendment guarantees defendants the right to confront their accusers, and in this case the court declared unconstitutional the practice of prosecutors’ introducing the testimony of absent witnesses without offering the defense the opportunity to engage in cross-examination. In Blakely v. Washington the court barred judges from imposing sentences in excess of the state maximum, but it allowed juries to do so as long as the facts of the case were deemed to have merit “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Finally, in the case of Schriro v. Summerlin, a divided court refused to apply retroactively a 2002 decision that invalidated the death penalty in cases in five states. Among the consequences of the ruling was that approximately 100 detainees would be returned to death row.

In the realm of civil liberties and civil rights, the court decided a number of disparately related yet important cases. Regarding discrimination, in Tennessee v. Lane the court upheld the right of disabled citizens to sue states if the states violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. The case involved a courthouse that had been inaccessible to persons with diminished ambulatory abilities. In Pennsylvania State Police v. Suders, the court developed guidelines for assessing allegations of sexual harassment. The baseline for its analysis was that employers would be liable for maintaining a workplace environment that would compel a reasonable person to resign. With procedures in place an employer could claim protection if an employee failed to use them, but if the harassment alleged corresponded to direct disciplinary action, then that blanket of protection would disappear.

In Locke v. Davey the court addressed the perennial issue of church-state relations as they pertained to educational opportunities. Under the establishment clause of the First Amendment, the court had increasingly accommodated a closer relationship between religious and governmental institutions, but in the present case the court was asked to answer whether the free-exercise clause requires religious schools to be included in various state “school-choice” programs. The court ruled 7–2 that it does not—that state subsidies for secular college education do not have to be paired with or necessarily include an obligation to fund divinity students. Finally, in what clearly ranked as the highest-profile case of the year, the court addressed the “under God” provision in the Pledge of Allegiance. Two years earlier the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had drawn considerable attention—and heat—for having ruled that the phrase “under God” amounted to a state-led demonstration of religious devotion and therefore compromised the wall of separation dividing church and state. The decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow was much less dramatic; indeed, it scarcely addressed the matter of religious establishment or free exercise. O’Connor and Rehnquist did argue that “under God” was a political rather than a purely religious statement, given that in 1954, when the phrase was adopted, the United States was confronting the “godless communism” of the Soviet Union. The majority, however, simply asserted that the ruling of the lower court should be overturned because the petitioner, Michael Newdow, lacked legal standing. Newdow had brought the suit on behalf of his minor child, but Newdow and the child’s mother, who possessed primary legal custody, were in conflict over the child’s educational and religious upbringing. The court stated that Newdow therefore could not assert the exclusive legal right to bring suit on behalf of the child, and the decision of the lower court was overturned with surprisingly little fanfare.

Crime

Terrorism

On March 11, 2004, on the eve of the Spanish national election, multiple bomb blasts killed at least 200 rail commuters and injured more than 1,500 in Madrid. Though immediate blame for the blasts was placed on the Basque separatist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), subsequent investigations revealed that the attack was perpetrated by a group that was part of a complex European-wide network of radical Muslims with links to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda movement.

On September 1 in Beslan, inRussia’s North Ossetian Republic, a local school was attacked by 32 armed Chechen militants, who seized more than 1,100 hostages, including pupils (aged 7 to 17), parents, relatives, and teachers, who had gathered to celebrate the opening day of the new school year. The siege ended abruptly 54 hours later when explosive devices carried by the militants blew up prematurely and Russian security forces stormed the building. More than 340 people were killed, including at least 150 children, and more than 500 persons were injured, with many others missing. Responsibility for the atrocity was claimed by Riyadus-Salikhin, a Chechen liberation group led by notorious rebel warlord Shamil Basayev. That same group also claimed responsibility for suicide-bombing attacks on two Russian passenger jets, which had crashed within minutes of one another on August 24; 89 persons were killed. In the wake of these attacks, the Russian government, led by Pres. Vladimir Putin, introduced new and sweeping antiterrorism laws in the parliament and sought international support for a UN Security Council resolution to expand the definition of banned terrorist organizations to include liberation groups such as the Chechens and the Palestinians.

In its annual review of patterns of global terrorism, released in June, the U.S. Department of State (DOS) reported that during 2003 there were 208 acts of international terrorism. A total of 625 persons were killed in these attacks, and 3,646 were injured, a sharp increase from the 2,013 persons who had been wounded the previous year. The report noted that most of the attacks occurring in Iraq during 2003 did not meet the “long-standing U.S. definition of international terrorism because they were directed at combatants, that is, U.S. and coalition forces on duty.”

In Iraq there was a significant increase during 2004 in the number of noncombatants, including foreign-aid workers and journalists, who were taken hostage. Though some of these hostages were released—two 29-year-old Italian female aid workers were freed in September—others, including American construction engineers and a British colleague, were decapitated by their captors.

In September Pakistani Pres. Pervez Musharraf announced the elimination of Amjad Hussain Farooqui, Pakistan’s leading al-Qaeda figure and most-wanted terrorist. Farooqui, the alleged mastermind behind a number of terrorist attacks, including two recent attempts to assassinate Musharraf and the 2002 beheading in Pakistan of The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was killed by security forces during a raid in Nawabshah, a city in southern Pakistan.

Drug, Human, and Weapons Trafficking

In March U.S. Pres. George W. Bush sent to Congress his annual report, which listed the names of 23 major illicit-drug-producing and drug-transit countries, including Afghanistan, Myanmar (Burma), China, Colombia, India, Mexico, Pakistan, and Vietnam. President Bush also expressed concern over heroin and methamphetamine trafficking linked to North Korea. In September DOS officials informed Congress that poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, the world’s leading supplier of illicit opium, morphine, and heroin, was anticipated to rise by 40% during the year. In 2003 the narcotics trade had reportedly generated $2.3 billion in income for Afghanistan, which produced three-quarters of the world’s heroin, including 90% of the heroin trafficked to Europe.

In May a report by Amnesty International alleged that up to 2,000 women, many of them underage girls, had in recent years been forced into sexual slavery in the southeastern European province of Kosovo. The growth in sex trafficking and prostitution rackets had taken place since NATO-led peacekeepers occupied the province in 1999. Military personnel from a number of countries were reportedly involved in the rackets, with women being traded for up to $3,500 and kept in appalling conditions by their “owners.”

Muhammad al-Baradiʾi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), warned that a nuclear black market of “fantastic cleverness” was supplying countries that were seeking to develop illicit nuclear weapons. The IAEA confirmed that Libya and Iran had made extensive use of connections to top Pakistani scientists, including ʿAbd-al Qadir Khan, the leader of that nation’s nuclear weapons program. In February Khan, hitherto a national hero for having developed the “Islamic bomb,” made a public confession of wrongdoing while issuing a plea for clemency. Granting the plea, President Musharraf insisted there was no official involvement in Khan’s activities, which were motivated by personal greed. Commentators remained skeptical, however, noting that Pakistan’s nuclear program was supposed to be under close military control.

Murder and Other Violence

Preliminary figures released in June from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program indicated that despite an increase of 1.3% in murder over the previous year, violent crime in the U.S. declined 3.2% in 2003 compared with 2002, and property crimes in 2003 remained relatively unchanged from the 2002 figure.

In July the British Home Office reported that the crime rate in England and Wales fell by a further 5% during 2003 to produce the longest sustained drop since 1898. According to the latest British Crime Survey, the risk of becoming a victim of crime fell from 40% in 1995 to 26% in the 12 months to March 2004, the lowest level since the annual survey began in 1981.

Gun-control advocates expressed dismay in the U.S. when a 10-year federal ban on some types of assault weapons expired in September. The ban, imposed in the wake of a number of multiple slayings at schools and other places by persons armed with military-style weaponry, was credited with a dramatic decline in the use of these guns by criminals. Though more than two-thirds of Americans were said to favour an extension of the ban, President Bush placed no pressure on Congress to renew the measure.

In the first case of cannibalism in Germany since the 1920s, Armin Meiwes, a former soldier, was convicted of manslaughter in January for having killed and eaten his male lover. Meiwes—who had used Internet chat rooms to solicit his allegedly willing victim, Bernd-Jürgen Brandes—was sentenced to be imprisoned for eight years and five months. Fears that the widely publicized case might spawn copycat killings were realized in October when Berlin police found the dismembered body of Joe Ritzkowsky in a refrigerator. Ralf Meyer confessed to having killed and butchered his lover and was charged with “murder out of base motives, driven by sexual desire”; cannibalism was not an offense under German law.

White-Collar Crime, Corruption, and Fraud

Federal regulators in the U.S. achieved a number of high-profile successes in their ongoing efforts to prosecute and punish individuals believed responsible for some of the most notorious corporate excesses of the late 1990s. Former Enron chairman and CEO Kenneth Lay was indicted in July on 11 counts, including securities and wire fraud and bank fraud. If convicted, Lay, who continued to profess his innocence, faced a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison and huge fines. Earlier, federal prosecutors had also charged Bernard Ebbers, the former CEO of WorldCom, with conspiracy, securities fraud, and filing false statements in connection with that company’s $11 billion accounting scandal, which led to the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. Scott Sullivan, former CFO of WorldCom, pleaded guilty to the same criminal charges and agreed to testify against Ebbers in exchange for possible leniency in his sentencing. In October Martha Stewart, one of the best-known businesswomen in the U.S., began a five-month prison sentence after her conviction in March on charges of conspiracy, making false statements, and obstruction of justice. New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer (seeBiographies), who had successfully prosecuted a number of Wall Street firms, took aim at the insurance industry in October. Europe also had its fair share of corporate crimes, including the Mannesmann case (seeWorld Affairs:Germany) and the Parmalat probe (seeWorld Affairs: Italy.)

Law Enforcement

The dramatic shift in FBI priorities after Sept. 11, 2001, was revealed in a report released in April by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine of the U.S. Department of Justice. With a major focus on antiterrorism efforts, FBI investigations targeting drug trafficking, organized crime, and white-collar crime were greatly reduced. The largest cuts occurred in the FBI’s investigations involving Mexican drug organizations, primarily in the U.S Southwest. Other federal agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration, had taken up some of these responsibilities.

In a separate report in July, most of which was classified as secret, Fine drew attention to the significant management challenges facing the FBI in translating all the terrorist-related material it received from wiretaps and other sources of intelligence. The FBI’s electronic surveillance collection alone, in languages primarily related to counterterrorism activities—Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and Pashto—increased by 45% in 2003 compared with 2001. The FBI indicated that nearly 24% of its ongoing Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) intercepts were not being monitored, while more than 120,000 hours of potentially valuable terrorism-related recordings remained untranslated.

On July 22 the final report of the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission Report) was released. The report pointed to numbers of missed “operational opportunities” to discover the plot by al-Qaeda to launch its 9/11 attack and identified weaknesses in the approach taken by law enforcement, including the FBI, to counter the terrorist threat from Islamic extremists. The FBI’s approach to investigations was said to be case specific, decentralized, and geared toward prosecution. Effective counterterrorism strategies were hampered by limited resources, training, and information sharing. The commission recommended a number of measures, including the establishment of a National Counterterrorism Center, within the executive office of the U.S. president, to coordinate planning and give direction to counterterrorism efforts. The commission also recommended the appointment of a new national intelligence director with two main jobs: to oversee national intelligence centres and to coordinate the agencies that contributed to the national intelligence program. In December President Bush signed into law an intelligence-reform bill that would organize the 15 separate intelligence agencies under the command of a national intelligence officer.

Widespread public protests concerning the state of crime and the lack of personal security were reported in a number of Latin American countries during the year. Hundreds of thousands of citizens marched in the streets of Buenos Aires, Arg., in April following the murder of a kidnapped student. In Mexico a study found that 96% of crimes between 1996 and 2003 went unpunished, while in Brazil reportedly only about 8% of some 50,000 murders committed annually were being prosecuted successfully. Critics suggested that a major part of the problem was the lack of public confidence in the police, many of whom were involved in serious crimes such as kidnapping and drug trafficking.

In the United Kingdom sweeping changes were announced in January in the handling of cases involving mothers who were suspected of having killed their babies. British Attorney General Lord Goldsmith said that 258 cases would be reviewed involving a parent who had been convicted within the past 10 years of murder, manslaughter, or infanticide of a child under two years of age. The announcement came after British courts questioned a number of the convictions in which uncertainty existed among experts about the cause of sudden infant deaths.

In May Macedonian authorities charged a number of police officers with murder and issued a warrant for the arrest of former minister of the interior Ljube Boskovski after a lengthy investigation into the March 2002 deaths of seven young men (six from Pakistan and one from India) who had been shot dead in a remote spot shortly after they entered Macedonia from Bulgaria. Though the police claimed that the victims were terrorists, the investigation found that the seven men were illegal immigrants who had been en route to Greece to find work. They were killed in cold blood apparently in an effort to impress U.S. officials of Macedonia’s credentials as a loyal ally in the war on terror.

Death Penalty

Some small gains were registered in 2004 in the drive to eliminate the death penalty. Two more countries—Samoa and Bhutan—abolished the death penalty for all crimes, and, thus, for the first time totally abolitionist countries outnumbered those that retained the death penalty for ordinary crimes. Abolition of the death penalty was among a number of proposals submitted to the Mexican legislature by Pres. Vicente Fox. Kyrgyzstan extended for another year its moratorium on executions; Kazakhstan gave teeth to its December 2003 moratorium by replacing a number of death sentences with life imprisonments in January 2004; and Tajikistan adopted a similar ban in November. After commuting the death sentences of 44 soldiers who had been condemned for their role in a failed 1997 coup, Zambian Pres. Levy Mwanawasa insisted that he would not sign a death warrant for as long as he remained in office. In Malawi 79 death sentences were commuted. A national debate on whether the death penalty should be abolished was initiated in Nigeria, and it was reported that the Chinese government might reduce the use of the death penalty. The U.S. Supreme Court also announced that it would consider the legality of executing people who were under the age of 18 at the time of their crime; the court’s decision was expected in early 2005.

The first execution in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban occurred in April 2004, two and a half years after the establishment of the interim government. Dhananjoy Chatterjee, convicted of the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl, became the first person to be executed in India since 1995, and in Indonesia capital punishment was used for the first time in three years. A five-year de facto moratorium on the death penalty in Lebanon also came to an end when three men were executed in January. The U.S. state of Maryland resumed its implementation of the death penalty after a six-year hiatus. Nationwide there were 59 executions in 2004.